Ryugu

Ryugu is a dark, carbonaceous Near-Earth asteroid visited by JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft from 2018-2019. Hayabusa2 deployed four small landers (two MINERVA-II rovers, MASCOT, and a target marker) and collected two separate samples including material from below the surface after firing a copper-lined impactor. The 5.4 g of Ryugu material returned to Earth on 6 December 2020 has yielded the detection of more than 20 amino acids and many other prebiotic molecules — direct evidence that the building blocks of life were being formed on small bodies 4.6 billion years ago.